Plantronics NZ Esports Round Up 2015 – RECAP

For a month, between April and May 2015, we partnered with Plantroincs Gaming to run the NZ Esports Round Up (NER) 2015!

We played 4 epic games throughout the series, and ran online tournaments for each of them open to the New Zealand gaming crowd…

CS:GO

StarCraft 2

Smite

Hearthstone

CS:GO

This was our second time testing the waters with CS:GO, so our admin crew were fairly new.

Day 1, admittedly, was a disaster! Our server admin went AWOL and nothing worked! But to our surprise the NZ CS:GO community banded together and scrounged enough servers up for us to finish off the day, we can’t thank you enough. In the mean time we got in touch with a bunch of great players to set up fully functional 128 tick servers for Day 2 that we had full control over. We won’t name them here but they should know how eternally grateful we are, as well as excited to see what we can do going forward.

Day 2 was a blast. Games were smooth and soon enough we were up to the grand finals with Team FireUp vs Team Massive. Massive put up one hell of a fight but FireUp managed to clean up with a 16 | 9 win. Check out the grand finals match to the right!

We now have an awesome admin team and access to fantastic servers for the next CS:GO tournament we run so keep on the lookout for more tournament.

Prizes:

1st – Team FireUp – 5x Plantronics RIG headsets

StarCraft 2

THIS tournament brought us back to our roots as BarCraft NZ. A good bunch of NZ based StarCraft 2 players jumped on to Heart of the Swarm and tore up the battlefield culminating in the grand finals between Mighty Kiwi and Crimson. Mighty Kiwi had an early lead taking game 1 but then Crimson came in stalemating with ling roach play in game 2. It didn’t last though and Mighty Kiwi walked away with the win.

Since this tournament our relationship with Blizzard ANZ has gotten that much stronger so you can all expect more StarCraft 2 events in the future (not to mention Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm!!) :). We’re already looking at throwing on a WCS viewing party and setting up an SC2 LAN!

Prizes:

1st – Mighty Kiwi – Plantronics Gamecom 788 headset

2nd – Crimson – Plantronics Gamecom 308 headset

3rd – Metalcore – Plantronics Gamecom 308 headset

Smite

It was awesome to scrounge together a few local Smite teams and watch them duke it out in game. This MOBA is on the rise in OCE and we wanna be right there to support the magnificent scene forming around it.

For the grand finals, Team Silicon Sports faced off against Team HeadSetForDïvine‬. Silicon had some great early game but Headset always picked up quickly after, giving them the 3-0 victory.

Hearthstone

Last but not least we have our biggest tournament of them all – Hearthstone! With over 50 players competing this tournament was two days of absolutely epic card slinging mayhem! Some of the best players in the Oceanic region joined in and there were some tense on stream moments captured. The grand finals was a particularly nail biting experience as Frostyzz and Eiliu went back and forth leading to 4 games in the best of 5 series and an awesome final match. In the end, Frostyzz took the final blow through a smack to the face with his gold elite Jaraxxus!

Prizes:

1st – Frostyzz – Plantronics Gamecom 788 headset

2nd – Eiliu – Plantronics Gamecom 308 headset

3rd – Proteus – Plantronics Gamecom 308 headset

Congratz & Thanks For Playing!

Thank you to all the players who competed, all the viewers who watched, all the admins/ shoutcasters/ broadcasters and more who helped run these tournaments and

a big special thanks to

for putting faith in NZ eSports and prizing these tournaments!

It was one wild ride, and we loved every minute of it. Not to mention it has put Aspect of Gaming in a better position to run more tournaments for a wider variety of games in the future. We’ll see you NZ Esports lovers, players and viewers alike, again for more gaming epicness soon :).